Well, after 17 years of being a loyal mac owner I'm about to pull the trigger on buying parts to build a pc workstation. I've used pc's for onsite jobs before and have fielded some pc tech support questions from independent clients, but I've never actually owned a PC based box myself. I'm moving from web and print design into video and motion graphics and can no longer stomach Apple's allowing the Mac Pro to linger in purgatory, so I need to make the switch.

I'm hoping for some words of encouragement and advice from those who've worked on both platforms. I'm assuming that from a hardware and upgradeability standpoint I'm making the right decision. The OS will be a hard thing to get used to, but I've heard like anything it just takes time.

I've also heard a lot of people say that performance is just better for rendering from programs like cinema 4d and maya. Is there truth to this? My primary apps will be AE, PR, C4D, PS, AI, some Flash, and possibly some Nuke. I also use audio apps like Ableton, and althought I've been a logic user for over a decade, ableton has slowly taken it's place so I'm ok letting it go.

If anybody has any advice on how to ease the pain of switching, antivirus software, things to watch out for, etc. it would be much appreciated. Also, does anybody remap their control key to a different position? I'm afraid I'm going to be terribly slow with key commands using the position of the control key as opposed to the apple/cmnd key!

There are (today) 7 results with PPBM5.5 run on CS6. In general they are similar to CS5.5 results. All the very many new features have not impacted scores very much. When you open the PPBM5 results, click on the "Version" tab and select CS6. I guess I will have to run and submit results on my editing machine (i7-980X) that can be compared to the CS5.5 scores.

Thanks, Bill, but I posted on the PPBM6 itself, not PPBM5 run on CS6. However, I did run PPBM5 on the CS6 in my main i7-2600K system: For some reason the MPEG-2 DVD encoding times were significantly slower (with the CPU overclocked to 4.4GHz) than with CS5.5 -- 112 seconds versus 70 seconds. Worse, the 70 second result I had with CS5.5 is now a fluke: The MPEG-2 DVD time increased by more than 65 percent (to 116 seconds) when I dropped the CPU clock speed by only 20 percent (from 4.4GHz to 3.5GHz). This means that there may be caching going on in CS5.5 with regards to MPEG-2 encoding.

@DB2012 it might be helpful to find out which Mac you are switching from and what if any of the software you have now? If it is a 2010 MacPro, i'd say get yourself a copy of win 7, an nvidia card and another harddrive.

I use both platforms, Mac and PC, and don't find any real differance in the user interface. I mean once you are working in your program it's the same program. Getting used to the Control key wasn't hard at all, so the differeances are minor. I like the way the files list in Mac but that's also minor to me and always have to click on the list view. However, my PC build has been rock solid. It has only crashed once in PrPro and I simply upgraded the defrag utility, application, so you go about solving issues the same way. It's also nice knowing what updates and upgrades are on the horizon. No secret upgrades and announcements or being completely in the dark not knowing if or when your hardware would be upgraded. Of course with the PC there is a lot more options. Don't skimp out on your components. Coming from a Mac point of view where you are paying a lot for good gear, go ahead and get a kick *** case, power supply, etc. I put my first one together in one night. I didn't get the most expensive RAM, (you know what RAM works, maybe you want the best) but spent an extra $150 on the case and extra $75 on the powersupply, and everything else wasn't the most expensive but best bang for the buck approach. It's nice having that opttion to fine tune and select exactly what you want for your budget as opposed to Apple's marketing stratigy to sell you up, where the sweet spot is not really available beween the limited selection.

Before I upgraded to Norton, the free Windows security kept my machine virus free for about a year. I thought Norton would find something but it didn't.

Shadow Protect is the best back up software. I've had a complete drive falier, where I had to remove the entire drive and put a new one in, and was back up in 30 minutes.

I use Perfect Disk and CCleaner. You can find lots of good info here at this site.

The only real issue I've had is when working on the same project and other editors are in FCP. However if they are willing to work in Premiere or AE it's a snap to transfer projects at the right time. Although a lot of people are still using FCP and Macs.

The advange is you will be able to use both, although you might only be able to afford one platform and might be the odd man out as the Mac people I've experienced are only know Macs and cling to FCP like a dying family pet.

Performace and value PC wins hands down for me. The only reason people are staying with Macs is they have a lot invested in plug ins. I like Macs but the options are too restrictive.

I totally hear you on not skimping, and I didn't! Cosmos II, 3930k, Rampage IV Extreme, 32gb g.skill ares ram, ax850 psu. It was totally fun picking out parts (despite a lot of research), and coming from the Mac world it's awesome to spend an extra $100 here, $150 there, and actually GET something for it rather than paying a ridiculous mac tax on things that should be standard options.

Anyhow, I'm so excited! Ths was my first 'hand built' computer, and doing it for the first time with all high end parts was a bit scary, but it all works great so far. Temps are looking good and I'm passing all the spec tests I've run so far. I'm sure I'll have questions moving forward, but thanks for the advice nd encouragement!

NIce build. Looks like you nailed it. Good timing too. I've been using the Rampage 3 Formula, g skills ram, and 6 core 980 for a year, overcloced, and it's been flawless. All of the software I loaded and the only freeze I had was some ten months later and I upgraded to Perfect Disk to defrag. That one project was really unorganize file sources as well. When it comes time to upgrade you will appreciate the full tower with lots of room and gold powersupply. I got the 1200 but that's really overkill because I don't use over 400wats. YOu have a lot of good options going forward.